London 2015

Culture, Memory and Extinction

Recent months have seen an explosion of public, media and academic interest in the idea, threat and reality of extinction. The wide readership of Elizabeth Kolbert’s recent publication, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (2014), has demonstrated a growing awareness that we are in a new era of mass-species extinction. This acknowledgement has contributed to debates over climate change and other, related, ways that humanity has altered environments and ecosystems in this epoch we have begun to call the Anthropocene. This one-day conference asks what role can culture play in widening the understanding, representation and, indeed, remembrance of this unfolding and catastrophic species loss. With this in mind, the event aims to foster dialogue between academics, journalists, museum curators, charities, writers, environmental groups, and the media to explore how societies engage with the complexities of the processes of extinction and remember the extinct. More specifically, the event examines how increased dialogue between these communities and constituencies contributes to the public re-evaluation and remembrance of life on our planet.

SEBASTIAN BROOKE (Director,Mass Extinction Monitoring Observatory): ‘”…such a trivial thing as a rotten Shell”: An introduction to the MEMO Project: World Heritage, geology and architecture on a semi-detached island’

DAN BARNARD (Artistic Director, fanSHEN theatre company and Senior
Lecturer in Drama and Performance, London South Bank University): ‘Climate Change, the challenges of imagining the future, and
how the arts might be able to help’: practice-informed reflections